Although the focus of research and public perception in
the West has been on radical Islamic thought and movements, many Muslims adhere
to principles which could be described collectively as"Liberal Islam."This
refers to interpretations of Islam that have a special concern regarding such
issues as democracy, separating religion from political involvement, women's
rights, freedom of thought, and promoting human progress. In each case, the
argument is that both Muslims and religious piety itself would benefit from
reforms and a more open society. (1) These attitudes parallel those of
liberalism in other cultures and also of liberal movements in various religious
faiths.

It
is quite possible that these tendencies will grow more important in the future,
perhaps even coming to be the dominant orientation in the years to come. Such a
trend could happen because of local factors, modernization and development in
Islamic societies, and reasons similar to those that brought about such an
evolution in the West.

The Tropes of Liberal Islam

Liberalism
in the Islamic world and liberalism in the West may share common elements, but
they are not exactly the same thing. They may both support multi-religious
co-existence, for example, but go about it in different ways. Within the Islamic
discourse, there are three main tropes that I call:

(a) the "liberal shari`a"

(b) the "silent shari`a"

(c) the "interpreted shari`a"

Shari`a is the body of Islamic guidance
and precedent that has been handed down from the time of the Prophet Muhammad in
7th-century Arabia.

The
"liberal shari`a" argues that the revelations of the Qur'an and the
practices of the Prophet command Muslims to follow liberal positions. For
example, in the case of Ali Bula (Turkey, born 1951) quotes Sura 109, Verse 6 of
the Qur'an: "To you your religion, to me my religion." He goes into
great detail describing the "Medina Document," a treaty signed by the
Prophet Muhammad with the Jewish tribes of Medina in the first moments of the
Islamic era: "The urgent problem of the day was to end the conflicts and to
find a formulation for the co-existence of all sides according to the principles
of justice and righteousness. In this respect, the Document is epochal....A
righteous and just, law-respecting ideal project aiming for true peace and
stability among people cannot but be based on a contract among different groups
(religious, legal, philosophical, political etc.).…This is a rich diversity
within unity, or a real pluralism." (pages 170-174)

Chandra
Muzaffar (Malaysia, born 1947) quotes Sura 49, Verse 13: "O mankind! We
created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations
and tribes, that ye may know each other, not that ye may despise each
other." (page 157) Mohamed Talbi (Tunisia, born 1921) quotes Sura 5, Verse
48: "To each among you, have We prescribed a Law and an Open Way. And if
God had enforced His Will, He would have made of you all one people." (page
164) Hostile and discriminatory forms of inter-religious relations, according to
this trope, are un-Islamic. In the words of Subhi Mahmassani (Lebanon, born
1911): "There can be no discrimination based on religion in an Islamic
system." (page 23)

Mohamed
Talbi (Tunisia, born 1921) quotes Sura 5, Verse 48: "To each among you,
have We prescribed a Law and an Open Way. And if God had enforced His Will, He
would have made of you all one people." (page 164) Hostile and
discriminatory forms of inter-religious relations, according to this trope, are
un-Islamic. In the words of Subhi Mahmassani (Lebanon, born 1911): "There
can be no discrimination based on religion in an Islamic system." (page 23)

The
second trope, the "silent shari`a," holds that coexistence is not
required by the shari`a, but is allowed. This trope argues that the shari`a is
silent on certain topics-notbecause
divine revelation was incomplete or faulty, but because the revelation
intentionally left certain issues for humans to choose.

For
example, Humayun Kabir (India, 1906-1969) argues that the precedent of the early
period of Islam does not apply automatically to later periods: "The
situation changed as the Muslim empire spread rapidly through large areas of
Asia and many different peoples were brought within its fold. Many practical
problems arose and Muslim political thinking had to find a place for non-Muslim
subjects in a Muslim State. ...[In India, today, for example,] Muslims have
condemned compulsion in religion and admitted that different religions must be
given due respect." (pages 148, 152)

Syed
Vahiduddin (India, born 1909) quotes the same Qur'anic verse as Mohamed Talbi:
"In a pluralistic and multi-religious society one cannot do better than to
ponder on the Qur'anic vision of human conflicts: To every one of you we have
appointed a right way and open path. If Allah had willed, He would have made you
one community...." (Sura 5, Verse 48) But Vahiduddin interprets this verse
within the context of the changing needs of an evolving Islamic community: the
late 20th century, he writes, is a period, "When Muslims are tempted to
take an extremely static view of religion. Their preoccupation with issues which
are not of capital importance has made them uncompromising not only in
inter-religious dialogue but also in inter-Islamic dialogue." (pages 22-23)

Similarly,
Abdurrahman Wahid (Indonesia, born 1940), leader of the world's largest Islamic
organization, calls the 1945 Indonesian constitution better suited than an
exclusively Islamic state for the particularly multi-cultural setting of
contemporary Indonesia. "[T]here is a need for steps to be taken to resist
the deterioration of relations between the different religions and faiths in
Indonesia," he writes, and the first of these steps is the defense of
democratic freedoms: "First of all, efforts to restore the attitude of
mutual respect among people from different faiths should be based on the
fundamental legal principles of freedom of speech (even for very small minority
groups), the rule of law and equality before the constitution." (3)

The
first trope of liberal Islam holds that the shari`a requires democracy, and the
second trope holds that the shari`a allows democracy. But there is a third trope
that takes issue with each of the first two. This trope is "interpreted
Islam." According to this view, "Religion is divine, but its
interpretation is thoroughly human and this-worldly." (Abdul-Karim Soroush,
Iran, born 1945) (page 246):

"The
text does not stand alone, it does not carry its own meaning on its shoulders,
it needs tobe situated in a context, it
is theory-laden, its interpretation is in flux, and presuppositions areas actively at work here as elsewhere in the field of understanding.
Religious texts are no exception. Therefore their interpretation is subject to
expansion and contraction according tothe
assumptions preceding them and/or the questions enquiring them .…We look at
revelationin the mirror of
interpretation, much as a devout scientist looks at creation in the mirror of
nature ... [so that] the way for religious democracy and the transcendental
unity of religions,which are predicated
on religious pluralism, will have been paved." (pages 245, 251)

Farid
Esack (South Africa, born 1959), cites the words of `Ali ibn Abi Talib, fourth
caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet: "this is the Qur'an, written in
straight lines, between two boards [of its binding]; it does not speak with a
tongue; it needs interpreters and interpreters are people."Esack translates this into contemporary terms: "Every
interpreter enters the process of interpretation with some preunderstanding of
the questions addressed by the text-even of its silences-and brings with him or
her certain conceptions as presuppositions of his or her exegesis." Esack's
pre-understandings emerge from the multi-religious struggle against apartheid in
South Africa. He argues that this commitment resonates with the spirit of early
Islam, when an "emerging theology of religious pluralism was intrinsically
wedded to one of liberation." (4)

Similarly,
Hassan Hanafi (Egypt, born 1935) wrote: "There is no one interpretation of
a text, but there are many interpretations given the difference in understanding
between various interpreters. An interpretation of a text is essentially
pluralistic. The text is only a vehicle for human interests and even passions.
... The conflict of interpretation is essentially a socio-political conflict,
not a theoretical one. Theory indeed is only an epistemological cover-up. Each
interpretation expresses the socio-political commitment of the
interpreter." (page 26)

Amina
Wadud-Muhsin (United States, born 1952) argues in a similar vein that "when
one individual reader with a particular world-view and specific prior text [the
language and cultural context in which the text is read] asserts that his or her
reading is the only possible or permissible one, it prevents readers in
different contexts from coming to terms with their own relationship to the
text." (page 130)

Abdullahi
An-Na`im (Sudan, born 1946) said: "there is no such thing as the only
possible or valid understanding of the Qur'an, or conception of Islam, since
each is informed by the individual and collective orientation of
Muslims...." (5)

This
third trope suggests that religious diversity is inevitable, not just among
religious communities but within Islam itself.

The Social Location of Liberal Islam

Few
if any of the authors quoted above have read one another's work. These liberal
positions appear to be emerging independently throughout the Islamic world. This
simultaneous appearance is due to three historic shifts of the past several
decades.

Increasing Advanced Education

Widespread
higher education has broken the traditional religious institutions' monopoly on
religious scholarship. Millions of autodidacts now have access to texts and
commentaries, such as non-clerics with secular educations: engineers such as
Muhammad Shahrour (Syria, born 1938) and Mehdi Bazargan (Iran, 1907-1995);
philosophers such as Muhammad Arkoun (Algeria-France, born 1928) and Rachid
Ghannoushi (Tunisia, born 1941); and sociologists such as `Ali Shari`ati (Iran,
1933-1977) and Chandra Muzaffar (Malaysia, born 1947).

For
example, Fatima Mernissi (Morocco, born 1940), trained in sociology rather than
theology, examined the hadith (tradition of the Prophet), "Those who
entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity!" Consulting a
variety of ancient sources, she discovered that the hadith was attributed to Abu
Bakra (died circa 671)-born a slave, liberated by the Prophet Muhammad, who rose
to high social position in the city of Basra. He is the only source for this
hadith, and he reported it 25 years after the Prophet's death. Mernissi suggests
that this hadith, though included in Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari's collection
of traditions, Al-Salih (The Authentic) and widely cited in the Islamic world,
is suspect for two reasons.

First,
when placed in context, Abu Bakra's relation of the hadith seems self-serving.
He was trying to save his life after the Battle of the Camel (December 656),
when, to quote Mernissi, "all those who had not chosen to join `Ali's clan
had to justify their action. This can explain why a man like Abu Bakra needed to
recall opportune traditions, his record being far from satisfactory, as he had
refused to take part in the civil war. ... [Although] many of the Companions and
inhabitants of Basra chose neutrality in the conflict, only Abu Bakra justified
it by the fact that one of the parties was a woman." (pages 116-117)

Second,
Abu Bakra had once been flogged for giving false testimony in an early court
case. According to the rules of hadith scholarship laid out by Imam Malik ibn
Anas (710-796 A.D.), one of the founders of the science of hadith studies, lying
disqualifies a source from being counted as a reliable transmitter of hadith.
"If one follows the principles of Malik for fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence],
Abu Bakra must be rejected as a source of hadith by every good, well-informed
Malikite Muslim." (page 119)

Thus,
in the world of CD-ROMs and global internet access, anyone literate in Arabic
with a personal computer, like Mernissi, can investigate the sources of Islamic
law and question the reigning interpretations.

Increased International Communication

International
technologies of communication-newspapers, telegraph lines, and international
trade-as well as radio, television, telephones, and the internet, are bringing
educated people from around in the world into ever-closer contact. The ideals of
Western liberalism, like other Western notions such as nationalism, have entered
people's homes around the world. People in Gabon, West Africa, for example,
watched the fall of Communism in eastern Europe and started demanding democracy
themselves, prompting that country's dictator to comment derisively on the
"wind from the east [i.e., the Communist Eastern bloc] that is shaking the
coconut trees." (6)

Another
example: Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesia, born 1939) defends freedom of thought by
quoting the famous U.S. judge Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894): "The
ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-that the best
test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted [in the]
competition of the market ..." Madjid goes on to say: "Among the
freedoms of the individual, the freedom to think and to express opinions are the
most valuable. We must have a firm conviction that all ideas and forms of
thought, however strange they may sound, should be accorded means of expression.
It is by no means rare that such ideas and thoughts, initially regarded as
generally wrong, are [later] found to be right. ... Furthermore, in the
confrontation of ideas and thoughts, even error can be of considerable benefit,
because it will induce truth to express itself and grow as a strong force.
Perhaps it was not entirely small talk when our Prophet said that differences of
opinion among his umma [community] were a mercy [from God]." (page 287)

A
further example of how technology is inducing change in the Islamic world is the
tremendous Internet activity surrounding the arrest of former Malaysian deputy
prime minister Anwar Ibrahim (born 1947), whose trajectory from youthful
Islamist militant to liberal reformist coincided with his increasing use of
quotations from William Shakespeare and other cross-cultural sources. Ibrahim's
political career began with a communalist Islamism that scapegoated Chinese
Malaysians.In recent years,
Ibrahim had become an outspoken proponent of multi-religious co-existence, both
in Malaysia and at the global level: "The experience of contemporary Islam
in Southeast Asia has much to contribute not only to Muslims in other regions
but possibly also to the world at large. This is due to the fact that the devout
Southeast Asian Muslim practices his religion in the context of a truly
multicultural world.Especially in
Malaysia, a Muslim is never unaware of the presence of people of other faiths;
as friends, colleagues, collaborators, partners or even competitors." (7)

Some
of these sites registered hundreds of thousands of visitors in two or three
months. As one flashing pro-Ibrahim Web site noted in halting English:
"Welcome to J's Reformasi Online, the site of the oppressed and depressed!!
In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful."

Some
countries, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, have tried to block foreign ideas from
entering their countries precisely because they fear these sorts of
inter-cultural interactions.But
blocking foreign ideas, to quote U.S. President Woodrow Wilson out of context,
"is like using a broom to stop a vast flood." (8)Few countries will be able to keep up this level of sweeping for long.

The Failure of Islamic Regimes

A
third factor in the rise of liberal Islam is the failure of alternative
ideologies. In particular, there appears to be a growing sense that Islamic
regimes have not lived up to their promise. The Sudan and Pakistan, for example,
have proved to be no less corrupt after the Islamization of the government than
before. Taliban rule in Afghanistan horrifies most Muslims. (9)

The
number one disappointment for "fundamentalist" Muslims, however, is
Iran. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 raised tremendous hopes among Islamists in
Malaysia, Africa, and throughout the Islamic world. Iran was to be the showpiece
of the Islamist movement. For the first time since the seventh century, a truly
Islamic society was to be constructed. It has been painful for these people to
find that dream unfulfilled.

There
are many examples of this painful disillusionment and the liberal outcome that
resulted. Consider `Abdul-Karim Soroush, a man who wholeheartedly favored the
Islamic Republic in the early years.Soroush
participated actively in the revolutionary reorganization of the universities in
Iran, which involved getting rid of many fine professors in the name of
ideological purity. Yet even this staunch supporter of the Islamic Republic
eventually had his doubts. By the mid-1980s he had started to distance himself
from official committees on which he had served. By the late 1980s he came to
realize that the Islamic Republic was not ushering in a new era of justice and
righteousness. Soroush started to criticize the government and began to call for
a reinterpretation of Islamic law and for academic and intellectual freedoms
that his university reorganization had disregarded in the early 1980s. These
themes, along with his impressive erudition and his talent for public speaking,
made Soroush one of the most popular public speakers in Iran in the early 1990s.
He spoke at mosques and universities and on the radio, always to big audiences.
Naturally the Iranian government found his words threatening, and Soroush has
since been barred from speaking publicly in Iran. He now speaks outside of Iran,
when he is allowed to travel, addressing international audiences, mainly in
Europe and North America, stressing the commonality of his views with Western
interpretations of religion. But the pain of Soroush's break with the Islamic
Republic and his disillusionment are apparently so great that he literally
cannot deal with his own former hopes and aspirations. In interviews, Soroush
denies that he was a supporter of the Cultural Revolution in Iran or that he was
active in the reorganization of the universities. (10) The Islamic Republic in
Iran appears not only to be generating liberal ideas, but may even be erasing
the memory of Islamist ideals.

Challenges to Liberal Islam

Although
there are Muslims who find common ground with Western liberals, liberal Islam is
not without its detractors.Some
claim that liberal Islam is inauthentic, that it is a creation of the West and
does not reflect "true" Islamic traditions. "Authenticity
movements" have been increasing globally over the past quarter-century,
from religious authenticity movements such as Islamism or the B.J.P. Hindu
nationalist party in India, to ethnic authenticity movements such as tribal
hostilities that have resulted in gruesome massacres in central Africa. The
emphasis on authenticity is not limited to the Islamic world.

One
of the crucial characteristics of this renewed interest in authenticity is the
idea that one can take a culture and draw a box around it; that a culture can be
defined as a discrete entity, separate from other cultures, with well-defined
boundaries. In reality, these boundaries are rarely so precise. In Uzbekistan,
for example, the government insists that the Now Ruz New Year's celebration was
invented in Central Asia, not in Iran-as if cultural practices would be less
valuable if they were imported from elsewhere.

The
flip side of this increasing need for cultural ownership is a flurry of
criticisms against things or people for not being authentic enough. Because
liberal Islam shares concerns with Western liberalism, critics claim, it must
not be a valid interpretation of the religion-if X is Western, it cannot be
Islamic. This binary opposition ignores the tremendous history of cultural
borrowings and influences that permeated the supposed border over the centuries.

If
the first charge is that liberal Islam is inauthentic, and therefore somehow
wrong, the second charge argues that liberal Islam should not be tolerated
whether or not it is wrong. For example, Gai Eaton, a British Muslim, calls
liberal Muslims "Uncle Toms." (11) ("Uncle Tom" is a
derisive term used by African-Americans to describe a Black person who is
grotesquely servile to whites.) In essence, Eaton is calling liberal concerns
treasonous to the cause of Islam.Not
only are these concerns wrong, according to Eaton's way of thinking, but right
or wrong, raising these concerns publicly weakens the Islamic world in its
struggle with the West. It is like a team sport, where each side demands loyalty
from its members and sees any internal critique, any self-critique, as aiding
and abetting the other team.

In
Iran, for example, the feeling of being besieged by foreign, especially
American, hostility is so strong that in order to survive, politicians must
prove that they are not "soft" on the "Great Satan." (12)
Iranian politicians who wish to negotiate with the West, or to raise concerns
about democracy, human rights, or other issues, are immediately labeled by their
political opponents as "soft on Satan." This pattern is so common and
so damaging to liberal concerns, that even Iran's moderate president, Muhammad
Khatami, engaged in liberal-bashing during his campaign in 1997, perhaps in
order to ward off similar criticism of himself. In one speech, on May 4 at
Tehran University, Khatami sounded liberal themes such as: "The government
should provide a safe environment for the people so that they may express their
opinions on internal issues and economic affairs," and "We should
study the West, a fountain of all transformations." At the same time, he
accused some liberal oppositionists of having "fallen in the lap of
foreigners," of not being a legitimate political party, and of not coming
"from inside society." (13)

Western
ignorance poses yet another challenge for liberal Islam. For
centuries, the West has constructed an image of Islam as "the Other,"
identifying Islam with its most exotic elements. Islamic faith has been equated
with fanaticism, as in Voltaire's Mahomet, or Fanaticism (1745). Islamic
political authority has been equated with despotism, as in Montesquieu's
intentionally redundant phrase "Oriental despotism." And, Islamic
tradition has been equated with backwardness and primitiveness, as in Ernest
Renan's inaugural lecture at the College de France (1862}:

"Islam
is the complete negation of Europe; ... Islam is the disdain of science, the
suppressionof civil society; it is the
appalling simplicity of the Semitic spirit, restricting the human mind,closing it to all delicate ideas, to all refined sentiment, to all
rational research, in order to keepit
facing an eternal tautology: God is God." (14)

Aside
from bias, Western policy must better understand the distinctions within Islamic
movements. An exampleis the recent
history of Algeria. The Front de Salvation Islamique (FIS), was divided into
liberal and radical factions. During the elections of late 1991 and early 1992,
the liberal wing was in the ascendant; its leaders were setting the group's
policy, its candidates were running for office, and it stood a great chance of
actually coming to power.

`Abbasi
Madani, the leader of the liberal faction, made a number of statements aimed at
calming the fears of Algerians and Westerners about the intentions of the FIS,
such as: "Pluralism is a guarantee of cultural wealth, and diversity is
needed for development. We are Muslims, but we are not Islam itself. ...We do
not monopolize religion. Democracy as we understand it means pluralism, choice,
and freedom." (16) The FIS had won 81 percent of the first-round elections
in December 1991 and was poised to do equally well in the second round in early
January 1992 when the Algerian military, supported by France and the United
States, canceled the elections, banned the FIS, and arrested its leaders. The
result was that the liberals within the Islamic movement were thoroughly
discredited for having proposed an effort to win within the rules of democracy.
The radical wing prevailed and even murdered liberal Islamic activists who
objected to terrorism, such as Mohammad Sa`id and Abderrazak Redjam who were
killed in 1995. The Western inability to believe that there might be such a
thing as liberal Islam proved a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Conclusion

There
is a growing number of Muslims who share common concerns with Western
liberalism, one of which is peaceful multi-religious co-existence. There are
three Islamic approaches in this context which, while still very much minority
views, seem to be growing. In the "liberal shari`a" school, Islamic
scholars base their arguments on injunctions in the Qur`an and on precedents
from the early years of Islam.

Using
an argument that might be called the "silent shari`a," Islamic
scholars argue that the shari`a does not speak about certain topics-not because
the revelation is incomplete or imperfect, but because these matters have been
intentionally left to human invention.

The
third approach is the "interpreted shari`a," where Islamic scholars
argue that the revelation is divine, but interpretation is human and fallible
and inevitably plural.

These
liberal approaches to multi-religious co-existence have been stimulated by three
historic shifts of the past quarter century: the rise of secular higher
education in the Islamic world, which has broken the monopoly of the seminaries
over religious discourse; the growth of international communications, which has
made educated Muslims more aware than ever of the norms and institutions of the
West; and the failure of Islamic regimes to deliver an attractive alternative.

These
liberal approaches face serious challenges, including accusations of treason and
inauthenticity, and a Western ignorance about the existence and importance of
this internal Islamic debate.

See the internet website devoted to Soroush's thought
(http://www.seraj.org), and "Intellectual Autobiography: An
Interview," in Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential
Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, translated by Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri
(forthcoming).

Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man (Albany, New
York: State University of New York, New York, 1985), page 12.